THEATRE
LEOPOLDSTADT
★★★✩✩ Wyndham’s Theatre, London WC2 (Tickets: 0844 482 5120/ wyndhamstheatre.co.uk; £15-£135)
BLITZ
★★✩✩✩
Union Theatre, London SE1 (Tickets: 020 7261 9876/ uniontheatre.biz; £20-£22)
THE HAYSTACK
★★★★✩ Hampstead Theatre, London NW3 (Tickets: 020 7722 9301/ hampsteadtheatre.com; £18-£37)
TOM STOPPARD, that most English of playwrights, was born Tomas Straussler in a small Moravian town from which his parents fled when he was an infant. Growing up, he knew of his Czech roots but only discovered his full Jewish heritage in his late 60s.
In Leopoldstadt, his most personal play to date, he explores the fate of Jews who did not escape the Nazis.
It is a play in two halves. In the first, we see the Werzes, wealthy, assimilated Jews in fin-de-siècle Vienna. They rub shoulders with the cultural titans of the age: Freud, Schnitzler, Klimt and Mahler. The family portrait is rich, touching and captivating, reminiscent of Bergman’s Fanny And Alexander.
The second half depicts the Werzes in various stages of decline: in 1924, 1938 and
1955. It is of course horrific to see Nazi thugs terrorising children and to hear an Auschwitz survivor relate the horrors of the Holocaust, but the material is extremely familiar.
Stoppard adds nothing to the many such accounts in books and films, and the play feels too easily emotive.
It also relies overmuch on having one character in every scene – a Zionist mathematician, a Great War veteran, a British journalist and the Auschwitz survivor – haranguing others with uncomfortable truths that they don’t want to hear. The play, particularly in the second half, is expository and didactic.
There is, however, a lot to enjoy in Patrick Marber’s deeply felt production. Making the most of the play’s humanity and humour, the entire cast, led by Adrian Scarborough and Jenna Augen, deserve praise. In particular, Sebastian Armesto and Luke Thallon provide two brilliantly contrasted double portraits.
Like Stoppard, Lionel Bart focuses on a Jewish family confronting the Nazis – but at a distance. Mrs Blitztein and her family are East End market traders who, in Bart’s musical
Blitz, endure Hitler’s nightly bombing raids with a mixture of Yiddish chutzpah and Cockney defiance, together with Bart’s laboured humour and unmemorable songs.
Without Dickens’s help, the composer of Oliver! proves incapable of writing a coherent plot and ends the evening with the most implausible wedding in the musical theatre canon.
Director Philwillmott and a crack cast led by the stalwart Jessica Martin give this rare revival everything they can. But for all the love and skill lavished on the production, Noel Coward’s assessment at the premiere that it feels “twice as loud and twice as long as the real thing” holds true.
The most exciting production of the week is also the most contemporary. Al Blyth’s The Haystack examines the workings of the secret state, as two GCHQ analysts spy on an investigative journalist who has discovered links between the British and Saudi royal families over arms sales.
Blyth’s accomplished first play is sure to make even the most trusting spectator question the nature of government surveillance. It is thrillingly directed by Roxana Silbert and features a top-notch cast led by the engaging Oliver Johnstone.